CHARITIES TO OUTSPEND THE STATE IN WAR ON CANCER
By James Chapman

Charities will soon by spending as much on cancer research as the Government, it was revealed yesterday.

The major boost to the fight against the disease, announced on World Cancer Day, follows the merger of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and the Cancer Research Campaign.

The new organisation, Cancer Research UK, will be the country's biggest charity and the worlds largest independent cancer research organisation. Only the U.S. Government's National Cancer Institute will be bigger.

"This is a red letter day for cancer patients everywhere and signals the dawn of a new age for research," said Professor Gordon McVie, co-director of Cancer Research UK. The new charity immediately unveiled a £75 million investment programme, Britain's biggest in 50 years.

The largest single item will be a £40 million, state-of-the-art research institute in Cambridge, employing 300 researchers, as a joint project with Cambridge University.

A £15 million research institute is also being set up in Oxford as a joint venture with Oxford University and the British Heart Foundation, to study the prevention and control of cancer and other killer diseases.

There will also be an £11 million research centre in Newcastle upon Tyne - the Northern Institute for Cancer Research - to develop anti-cancer drugs. The Government, the Foundation For Children With Leukaemia and Newcastle University will be involved in the venture.

Cancer Research UK, which has 3,000 researchers, doctors and nurses, currently spends £130 million a year on scientific research but aims to increase the figure to £200 million within five years

The Department of Health spent £190 million funding cancer research last year and says it is committed to spending £20 million on prostate cancer.

But both Professor McVie and Professor Karol Sikora, a former chief of the World Health Organisation's cancer programme, warned yesterday that cancer treatments were becoming so expensive the Health Service would be unable to keep up.

Professor Sikora, professor of oncology at Hammersmith Hospital in West London, said a 'two-tier' system is inevitable, with only the wealthy being able to benefit from the full range of treatments.

He said, "Between 2005 and 2010 there's going to be a whole set of new drugs and technologies that are going to cost an awful lot of money, yet there's no plans in place for how these are going to be paid for. The result will be greater inequity. The rich will be able to pay for things and the poor won't."

Professor Sikora predicted that cancer patients could soon be taking a once-a-day tablet for their treatment.

In the meantime, all patients should be entitled to a core package of cancer services, which more wealthy people could top up privately to get the latest drugs.

Professor McVie agreed there could be a two-tier system of cancer care. "We are already seeing that, with the rich finding their way through the system," he said. "But I don't think it's all about expensive drugs. It's more about lack of equipment and soldiers on the ground."

He said every NHS hospital should have up-to-date equipment and more cancer doctors and nurses.
Daily Mail, 5th February 2002

Phillip Day Comment: Once again here we have the greedy Gordon McVie justifying his own outrageous pay cheque. Notice that this article is all about anti-cancer drugs, but, due to cancer doyens McVie, Sir Richard Doll, Sikora and their colleagues demonstrating their usual cynical non-approach to diet, nothing is mentioned here that cannot keep their paymasters, the drug companies in business.

Notice that at no time do we ever hear about all the research that has gone in to diet as a means of preventing and reversing cancer. The Hegelian Dialectic presented to the public in the Mail article above only gives one option for the defeat of cancer - more financial investment, another pathetically expensive cancer centre, and grant money stretching into the hazy mists of the 21st century.

If omission of the truth were a crime, and maybe we should make it one, then Britain may yet relish the day when grant guzzle-hounds like McVie and Doll find themselves in the dock for massively betraying the public's confidence and contributing by their ignorance and Machiavellian schemes to the continuing cancer slaughter.